


an afterword of sorts

by iaintinapatientphase



Series: what it takes to survive [2]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Post Reynolds Pamphlet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-14
Updated: 2016-04-14
Packaged: 2018-06-02 02:41:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6547345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iaintinapatientphase/pseuds/iaintinapatientphase
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of course he did something stupid again, of course the consequences are coming down on her. You think he'd have learned by now, but Maria knows better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	an afterword of sorts

**Author's Note:**

> all maria deserves is happiness and all i can write about her is tragedy. she's okay, i promise. she's tough.
> 
> you can blame/thank [derevko](http://derevko.tumblr.com/) for this, i certainly do!

Maria runs up the subway stairs two at a time, skipping over the one that always seems to have gum on it. She likes these sandals, bought them with her new and improved paycheck at her new job, and she's not going to ruin them. No matter how much she likes being able to read while taking the train to work, the air quality leaves a lot to be desired, especially in the summer. She's just reached the top, dodged around the guy yelling at passersby for being sinners when her music gets interrupted by a long string of notifications. She barely has time to read who the texts and voicemails are from when she gets another phone call.

“Aaron?”

“Where are you?” he asks, crisp and businesslike. He doesn't usually call-- these days he's in DC more often than not, surrounded by aides and press and whoever else that he can't stand to be overheard by. He's better over email, his personal address that he gave her years ago and still checks frequently, always there when she needs advice or anything else. She hasn't needed a lawyer in a while, but she's liked having a friend.

“I just got off the train. Almost home. What's wrong?” The wheel of paranoid possibility spins wildly in the back of her mind. What would he know about before her? He hasn't been Susie's emergency contact for years, it can't be that. If it's not Susie, it can't matter all that much, but the six voicemails with his name on them say otherwise.

Aaron's never been one to baby her; he rips the band-aid right off. “Hamilton was giving an interview and the pamphlet came up.”

“Oh,” Maria says, shellshocked and entirely unsurprised. Of course he did something stupid again, of course the consequences are coming down on her. You think he'd have learned by now, but Maria knows better. “Is it bad?”

“It's getting a lot of attention,” Aaron says, which is his way of politely saying that it's very bad. “Where's Susie?”

“She's at dance. Lauren's bringing her home with her after,” Maria says. “Oh, God, is it--”

“It's perfectly fine, don't worry. Have Lauren take a cab -- send me a receipt and I'll expense it -- and if possible go in the back entrance. But it's fine. I promise.”

“Okay,” she says. “Can you text Lauren? I can't-- I don't want to--”

“I'll take care of it.”

“Thanks,” Maria says, shakes away the sudden tension. She likes Lauren quite a lot, maybe even…. maybe feels more, some days, but Lauren will be mad in her hot loud indignant way, the way Maria's never managed to be. It's Lauren that calls Hamilton a piece of shit and turns off the TV when he pops up on it, Lauren that got in a fight with someone in a bar who said they'd love to see him run for president, Lauren who read every scrap of coverage during the aftermath of his stupid pamphlet and left angry comments asking why no one cared about the real victim in this story.

Maria knows why, and she doesn't like to think about it. Maria knows what happened, she knows what he's like, she knows, knows, _knows_ all these things that she'd really rather not. It would be easier if she could just hate him and that was the end of it.

“I'm about to be home,” she says, peeking around the corner like somehow they forgot to come find her. “You're sure it's okay?”

“You remember what to do?”

“Don't talk, don't listen, don't engage,” she recites, the words uncomfortably familiar in her mouth. It was only a year ago that she dealt with this after the news broke, and she'd been left alone for the past ten months. She'll never forgive Hamilton for any of it, even if she was the one who talked to a reporter first.

“Good. They aren't allowed on private property. If they don't leave, call the police--”

_I’ll take you to the police station now… You can’t wait, you can’t stay, you don’t know what could happen._

“Why would the police care?” Maria demands, suddenly furious. Things like that don’t work for her. It was a battle to get full custody just like it was a battle to get a divorce, even when anyone with eyes could see what James was like. Nothing’s been like it was supposed to for her and she’s so sick of rich, successful men who beat the odds telling her that it’s her fault for not trusting the goddamn system. “I don't live in a nice area. It's not even my property, I just have a two bedroom on the third floor, why would they care about another poor black single mom? No one ever has.”

“Maria--”

“They won't even take my side, no one ever does,” she says bitterly, feeling the scraps of happiness she's painstakingly collected these past months slip out of her hands. “I'm just another fucking homewrecker getting the public lashing she deserves. I never should have moved back here, I should have stayed in Chicago, why did I move back? It's not like there's anything here for me.”

“You moved back because you like New York. You have every right to live wherever you want.”

She leans against a newspaper stand, shakes her head. “No, I--”

“Maria,” he says, in that calming tone that she hates for how well it works. “Do you trust me?”

“Yes,” she says automatically. He's about the only person she does. Certainly the only man.

“Good. We're on the same team here,” he says, like he did every time before they went into court together. She likes how even-keeled he is, how he never loses his temper, never raises his voice. The memory of him refusing to engage while Hamilton pressed (slammed his fist into) all his buttons is what convinced her to go see him in the first place. She appreciates it, the way he lets her yell and get upset and never gets mad at her. She's not stupid, she knows it's on purpose, knows it's him letting her practice emoting without fear of retribution, a kind of exposure therapy so she can talk to men without freaking out. She probably should resent it, but it works too well, and she's never liked lying when she doesn't have to.

“Yeah,” she says, risking another glance down the street. “Okay. I'm gonna turn onto my street now.”

“What's the plan if the press doesn't stay behind the sidewalk?”

“Call the police. Then call you.”

“That's right. Don't open the door, make your calls, watch a movie. I'll take care of it.”

She exhales, rolls her eyes even as she bites back a smile. “Aaron, you're not a lawyer anymore. You're not even in New York.”

“I'm _your_ lawyer,” he says. “I'm flying back in a few hours.”

“Don't. You don't have to do that.”

“I was coming back anyway. It's Thursday.”

“Well, fine,” Maria concedes. “But I'm not asking you to. I'm fine.”

“I know you are,” he says, and Maria decides not to push it. She knows he means it, even if he worries; and that's okay too. She kind of likes having someone to worry about her.

Maria turns the corner and squares her shoulders, braces herself to walk through the crowd of yelling men outside her gate. “I’m walking up to my building now. They don’t see me yet, but there’s a bunch. Maybe twelve.”

“Okay.”

“Maybe they won’t recognize me,” she says weakly. “I have work clothes on, they’ve probably only ever seen the pictures they put on TV.” They all _loved_ those, the party photos from her two years of college, the selfies she took when she was bored and alone, trapped in James’s apartment. They conveniently ignored the seven years of pictures with her daughter, her LinkedIn profile with her new job at the publishing company, her monthly donation to Planned Parenthood. Those weren’t scandalous enough to drive clicks to the “inside scoop” on Secretary Hamilton’s dirty little secret. They weren't enough of a contrast to angelic Dr. Elizabeth Schuyler-Hamilton, with the orphanage and the six kids and the way everyone lined up to defend her.

“Don’t hang up, but don’t talk until you’re inside,” Aaron says in her ear.

She can do this. “‘Kay,” she says, before pressing her mouth shut, holding her breath like she used to when driving past cemeteries.

“Maria! Maria! Maria!” The shouts come, always her first name, like they know her, like they know anything about her. She saw the videos of them following _him_. Even when he was literally breaking one of their cameras, they always called him Secretary Hamilton. Maybe they think she’s too stupid to notice these things, but she does.

None of them get too close. Maybe they remember the guy from Gawker who lost his job and got slapped with six different lawsuits after she told Aaron he cornered her outside the grocery store or the one from Drudge who grabbed her arm once that she never saw again. They don’t get too close, but she feels them anyway, crowding around her and pressing in and stealing the air she’s fighting to hold in her lungs.

She does her best to tune them out while she unlocks the door with shaking hands -- god, they are so fucking loud, why do they all need to yell at once, it’s not like she doesn’t know they’re there; she couldn’t forget it if she wanted to, can’t no matter how hard she tries. She holds her breath as she climbs the three flights to the safety of her apartment, a superstition she can’t let go of even if her head is swimming.

She slams and locks the door behind her, lets her phone hang loose beside her side while she gasps for air. She forgot what that was like. Maria thought she wanted to be noticed, but never like that.

She brings the phone up carefully, can hear the sounds of faint traffic even if Aaron isn’t saying anything. “I’m inside,” she says.

“Any trouble?”

“No. I even recognized a few of them. Bet they’re excited to be back on Maria-Watch.”

“It won’t last as long this time.”

“I sure as fuck hope not,” she says, throwing her keys across the room. She stays pressed against the door -- the therapist she lets Aaron pay for told her that consistent pressure on her back is a good way to relax. She thinks the therapist is mostly full of it, but it’s a distraction, at least.

Aaron pays for the therapist, pays for Susie’s private school, pays for all of Maria’s legal expenses and court fees out of pocket. She doesn't let it bother her. He's got a trust fund with more money than she knows how to count and he's never asked her for anything in return, no matter how many times she tests him.

He didn't pay for Maria to finish her degree, because she never went. In the early days, when she was still in the thick of the custody battle, he was helping her fill out job applications and she ended up telling him that she wanted to teach someday.

He had gone silent and avoidant, like he did and still does, before telling her that if the press ever found out about what happened with Hamilton, she would probably lose any teaching job she might get. That no one would want someone's mistress teaching their kids. He didn't actually say that, but Maria heard it anyway.

So she chose to let that dream go. She was sick of losing things and didn't want to go to work every day counting down the seconds until Hurricane fucking Hamilton came back into her life and ruined everything again. She worked at a law firm Aaron set her up with for a while, and six months ago gathered up her courage and applied for an executive assistant job with an editor at the company that put out her last three favorite novels, and in a stroke of unprecedented and uncharacteristic luck, got it.

Things have been pretty good, honestly. Everything got a little fucked when Hamilton wrote his stupid expose last year, but everything has been fine otherwise. She has Susie and they're safe and happy and nothing else really matters. She locks her eyes on the picture of them on the end table and tries to remember that. She's happy and they're happy and Hamilton is not going to fuck that up.

Someone on the other end of the phone is talking quietly, trying to get “Senator Burr” to listen. She hears Aaron sigh into the phone, mutter a firm “not now,” which she appreciates.

“What did he say?” she asks, finally.

Aaron’s silent for a few seconds. “I have the link,” he says reluctantly. “I’ll send it to you if you’re sure you want to watch.”

“Is it bad?”

“It’s not ‘bad,’ necessarily. They blindsided him with it, he got angry, made a scene.”

 _Typical_ , Maria almost says, can hear Aaron think to himself. “Oh,” she says instead.

“That’s the reason it’s such a story.”

“Not because he cheated on his wife and wrote a book about it?” she says nastily. He always finds a way to make himself the victim.

Aaron pauses. He doesn’t like to be reminded of what exactly happened. He _likes_ Hamilton, even if they aren’t friends anymore, likes his wife, the pretty, perfect Saint Eliza. Maria hates him a little when he reminds her that he feels sorry for Hamilton, but she can’t really blame him. The two of them were friends for a long time, and it’s not like Maria doesn’t have the impulse to pity him sometimes, too. “He hasn’t had a public meltdown in a while. They probably did it on purpose. Not that that’s an excuse,” Aaron says, sounding exhausted.

“No, it’s not,” she agrees. She looks down, traces the edge of the rug with her foot. “Aaron?”

“Yes?”

“Did they--” she has to stop, clear her throat. “Did they use my name, at least?” They never do, it’s always _that girl_ , or _the slut_ , or _Hamilton’s_ _undoing_ , never _Maria_ , never _the victim_ , never _the twenty three year old that the third most powerful man in the country took advantage of_. Not that she really wants to be reminded, but still. It’s better than acting like she was some kind of master seductress.

“He did.”

“Oh.” She takes a deep breath, kicks her foot a little. “That’s something, at least.”

“Yeah.” Aaron doesn’t ask if she’s okay, he’ll never make her lie to him or admit her weaknesses. But he doesn’t hang up the phone, waits while she tries to rebalance.

“I’m gonna go,” she says. “You sent me that link?”

“I did. Take it easy, okay?” Aaron says, the closest he’ll get to admitting that he’s worried. “You guys should come by for dinner this weekend. Theo likes hanging with Susie.”

“Maybe,” she lies. She’s not going to risk him being seen with her while the spotlight’s back on. He's up for reelection soon, and the last thing he needs is to be associated with Alexander Hamilton’s whore. Aaron doesn’t deserve that; all he’s ever been is decent to her. “I’ll text you tomorrow.”

“Call me if anything happens.”

“I will. Bye.”

Maria hangs up, looks at her phone. Susie and Lauren will be home in an hour and ten minutes. She needs at least thirty to make dinner, and she’d like to shower, which in her current mood will take at least twenty. She has twenty minutes to watch the video.

Twenty minutes, she repeats, going into the bedroom and carefully opening her laptop. She doubts the clip will be longer than five, so that leaves room to rewatch if she really wants to, and at least ten minutes to react. That’s good. She can work with that. With a schedule. She sets an alarm for eighteen minutes from now and places her phone carefully on the nightstand next to Lauren’s glasses.

She opens her email, clicks on “Fwd: Fmr. Sec. Hamilton on MSNBC.” An intern forwarded it to Aaron’s “senate.gov” address, and he forwarded to his personal gmail before sending it on to her -- so cautious, as always, though she doesn’t blame him.

She takes a deep breath, wraps her sweater tighter around herself, and clicks on the link.

Whichever producer put this together knows their audience: the headline reads “Alexander Hamilton Freaks Out on Live TV!,” the thumbnail is of him pointing angrily at the anchor, teeth bared. Maria feels a kind of pang of... something but shoves it down and clicks play.

It starts innocently enough. He’s wearing green, as usual, and looks like tired, stressed out garbage, as usual. Still wearing a wedding ring. Talking earnestly about some treaty, or something. It doesn’t matter, Maria’s sure he’ll get whatever he wants in the end. He always does.

She watches the polite smile slide right off of his face while the interviewer asks: “Now, Secretary Hamilton, you’ve been in the news quite a lot lately.”

“Have I,” he says flatly, and Maria can almost hear the way his bouncing foot abruptly stops, watches his eyes -- older now, more wrinkled around the corners, but still the same, still impossibly dark and blindingly bright at the same time -- narrow.

“We’re coming up on the one year mark since you published your ninety page confession of infidelity. What have you learned in the year since?”

“What the-- that’s an incredibly inappropriate question,” he sputters. “Do you really think that’s professional?”

The interviewer holds his hands up, _who, me?_ That's the wrong move, Maria knows instinctively. Hamilton will want a fight, not an apology. “Sorry, sir, our viewers have been anxious to hear how you and your family--”

“No,” he snaps. “Do not talk about my family, that is so over the line you cannot even believe.”

“Sir, I apologize if I've stepped over a line, I was just referencing _your_ statement on the issue.”

“Don’t you dare,” he hisses, and there's the shot from the thumbnail. Maria turns down the volume, sure in her knowledge of what's coming. She feels oddly exposed, watching the personal quirks that felt it like sometimes only she discovered play out in front of millions.

“Sir--”

“I didn't come on here to be interrogated about my personal life.”

“Our viewers are firmly on your side, Secretary Hamilton. Many are asking if you’ve spoken to the woman since, asked her why she went to the press?”

“Jesus, this interview is [censored] over,” he says, shoving himself back from the desk and flailing around, attempting to untangle the mic from his clothes. “Don't talk about my [censored] family ever again or I'll sue your entire [censored] station. And you know what? Leave Maria the [censored] alone, too.”

He's yelling something else, got himself worked into a righteous frenzy screaming about privacy and boundaries and whatever hypocritical nonsense he's deflecting his own failures with, but Maria can't hear anything but her name in his voice. She feels twenty three again, alone and scared and trying her pathetic best. He never thought anything of it, barging into her life and taking up her time and throwing her name around like he knew her. Sometimes it felt like it was every other word out of his mouth. It felt -- it was -- inescapable.

She never called him anything, except for the rarest of “hey you’s” or “baby’s” when she was really trying to push it. She never thought of him by anything but his last name, cold and impersonal and objective. The therapist tries to get her to call him "Alex," sometimes, but she still can't. She needed the distance. She had to remind herself that no matter how nice he could seem, how sincerely he smiled at her, how badly she craved the attention he gave her, that he wasn't a good guy and that he didn't give a shit about her, not really. Maria could have been any warm body for him to stick his dick in or cling to at night, and she hated when he would say her name that way and make her forget that.

She hates that even now -- after he wrote ninety pages about how he fucked her and paid her ex-husband for _his_ permission to continue, after he didn't bother to censor her information or warn her about his plans, after he never even apologized for what he did and failed to do -- him using her name like that makes her hate him a little less. Him refusing to call her “the woman” and even including her in his list of people to protect from the press shouldn't mean something, but it does.

The clip ends with him knocking over a chair in his haste to leave the set, one of the cameras swinging around to capture him grabbing his beat up messenger bag from the floor and slam his way out the door.

Maria wonders if he’s ever gotten it, at all, in the years that’ve passed. If he ever really realized what he did and how badly it fucked up her life. She’d like to think that he has, but she’s always had too much faith in him.

She opens another tab, pulls up his Twitter, makes a little face when the URL auto completes. She knows she does this more than she should, she doesn't need the computer to remind her.

There's nothing about the interview, which is fair, she supposes, it only happened an hour ago. The last one is from that morning: “On MSNBC tonight to address war rumors. In the mean time, chill!!!!” Charming.

She closes the window but saves the email, lies back on the bed and counts the plastic stars on the ceiling. Susie swears that they’re actually accurate to the night sky, and Maria believes her. It’s just not quite dark enough to see.

Maybe his wife gets it. Maybe after twenty something years of marriage she's figured out what exactly the fuck is wrong with him and understands what he did and what it cost Maria. Then again, Eliza seems like the type to send notes on tasteful, expensive stationary or… Edible Arrangements, or some dumb shit like that, and Maria hasn't heard a word. It doesn't matter, she supposes. None of it does. It's over, and Maria doesn't care anymore.

Her phone alarm goes off, and Maria forces herself out of bed and into the shower, lets the hot water push the remaining tension out of her while she sings under her breath, some pop nonsense that’s just complicated enough to occupy most of her mind. She’ll be clean in just a second, and then she can make dinner for her daughter and not talk about this with Lauren and just be okay for just a few hours. She’s come too far and fought too hard to be dragged back into that mess. He doesn't get to have any more of her, he doesn't get to win, he doesn't get to have any part in the rest of her story. That's up to Maria, and she's chosen to be happy. She's going to be. She is.

She just needs ten more minutes.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on [tumblr](http://iaintinapatientphase.tumblr.com/), come say hi.


End file.
